I reread I Capture the Castle this autumn. I first read it at fourteen, in a single weekend, lying on my bed with my feet up the wall the way you can only sit at fourteen.
What I remembered: the castle, the rain, Cassandra writing in her journal, the whole damp romance of living in a ruin. What I'd loved was the love story and the strangeness.
This time the romance barely held me. I knew how it went, so it had no suspense, and suspense turned out to be most of what fourteen-year-old me was reading for. What held me instead was the father. Mortmain, blocked, not writing, unbearable in exactly the way he's unbearable. At fourteen he was scenery. Now he's the weather of the whole house.
I think I also missed, the first time, how poor they are. Genuinely poor. Cold-floor, sell-the-furniture poor, under all the charm of the dressing-up and the candle ends. At fourteen the poverty read as romantic. Now I can feel the draft.
That's the thing about a book you already know the ending of. The plot has nothing left to give you, so you notice everything else. You're not reading to find out what happens. You're reading to find out what you'll see this time, which is mostly a roundabout way of finding out who's holding the book now.
I don't reread to get fourteen back. I'm not sure I'd want her. I reread because the book holds still and I don't, and it's interesting, in a quiet way, to stand the two of us next to each other and measure. I'll probably read it again at fifty and find I was wrong about the father too.